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The Inception Report for this Nuffield Foundation funded project has been published. It has been developed in consultation with the thirty person project Advisory Group which includes widespread representation from across the careers sector.

On 14 September, Dr Sangwoo Lee presented at an expert roundtable hosted by the British Academy.  Sharing findings from his recent research on multidimensional graduate job quality premiums across the UK and Europe, he argued that conventional evaluative metrics, which rely heavily on gross earnings and standard employment status, fail to capture the realities of modern graduate employment.

IER was also represented at the roundtable by Professor Peter Elias and Gabriel Atfield, contributing to discussions on skills, regional inequality, and the future data infrastructure needed to assess fair and sustainable work across the UK.

Non-standard working arrangements are coming under pressure: Payrolled employees fell by 39,000 in May-July 2026 and workforce jobs a by 48,000, the latter driven by a 43,000 decline in self-employed jobs. This suggests even non-standard arrangements that previously absorbed some labour market weakness are now under pressure

Around 1.8 million UK workers have poor mental or physical health due to their jobs. The cost to the economy is £18.8 billion every year. What if we stopped trying to fix workers, and started creating healthy jobs instead?

Our panels of experts will introduce the latest findings from the Project including:

• The Healthy Jobs Framework tool
• New evidence on practices that make jobs healthy
• Interactive Q&A

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 15 September, 13:00-13:45 hours

Register

As part of the Horizon Europe-funded Skills PULSE project, a newly published introduces a novel empirical framework to identify and measure potential skill shortages across European labour markets.

Co-authored by IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee alongside Seamus McGuinness, Elisa Staffa, Lorcan Kelly, and Paul Redmond, the paper addresses a longstanding gap in the skills mismatch literature, where definitions of skill shortages vary widely and rely heavily on subjective employer surveys.